Susan Sontag Quotes on Sense & Perception (9 Quotes)

The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure he continually restricts what he can enjoy. . .

Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene -- in the original meaning of that word ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in the sense that moral principles contradict the way things really are --- and always will be. How things really are --- and always will be --- is neither all-evil nor all-good but deficient, inconsistent, inferior. Principles invite us to do something about the morass of contradictions in which we function morally. Principles invite us to clean up our act to become intolerant of moral laxity and compromise and cowardice and the turning away from what is upsetting that secret gnawing of the heart that tells us that what we are doing is not right, and so counsels us that we'd be better off just not thinking about it.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth. . . the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us. . .

Taste has no system and no proofs.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.